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Aztec, Cantares Mexicanos, Desiderata, Hebrew Bible, James Doull, justice, Leonard Cohen, music, Stonehill College
I don’t remember when I first read the book of Ecclesiastes. I first taught it at the Catholic Stonehill College. There we were free to teach Intro to Religion however we wanted, so to follow my own intellectual curiosity I made it “God in the West”. The one thing we were required to teach was the book of Exodus, which I suspect the department had selected for an uplifting social-justice message in which God acts to free a people from slavery. But the Hebrew Bible, let alone the whole Christian Bible, has never spoken with a single voice, and I selected Ecclesiastes to teach alongside Exodus because the contrast between them is so remarkable.
Much like the Song of Songs (or Song of Solomon), which it immediately precedes, Ecclesiastes is a book you don’t expect to find in the Bible. It makes you wonder: what is this book doing here? The Song of Songs bears the most obvious contrast with what we think we know about the Bible: here is a text that is obviously about a young couple having sex, seemingly celebrating it, and they don’t even appear to be married. That’s not the sort of thing that we are led to imagine would appear in the Bible. But it’s in there.
Ecclesiastes’s contrast to the rest of the Bible is a little subtler, but it’s still notable. Exodus, and other prophetic books, give you a God who acts in the world with righteousness, freeing his chosen people from slavery with terrifying wonders. Ecclesiastes gives you a God who does not.
What one instead finds in Ecclesiastes above all is a bittersweet depiction of the unjust world, a world governed by fickle fortune. The text hauntingly proclaims: “All things have I seen in the days of my vanity: there is a just man that perisheth in his righteousness, and there is a wicked man that prolongeth his life in his wickedness.” Or more famously: “I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.”
And I love Ecclesiastes for all of that. In midterm evaluations, one of my Stonehill students complained that I was only teaching “the bad parts of the Bible, like Ecclesiastes.” I responded: “for me these aren’t the bad parts. I’d say it’s my favourite book of the Bible. You don’t have to agree with me; you’re free to hate it. But you need to know that it’s in there; if you’re Catholic, this is part of your tradition, and you need to think about it.”
I love Ecclesiastes because its unjust world is the real world. (That, and I love the beauty of the text – a beauty the Byrds appreciated when they made a portion of it into “Turn! Turn! Turn!”. That’s why I’m using the King James Version here; regardless of the translation’s accuracy or archaism, I know of no other English translation that matches the beauty of King James.)
Ecclesiastes claims that God judges the righteous and the wicked – but he doesn’t do anything about it! Not even in the afterlife: there is no mention of a heaven or hell, and “the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten.” This is the world that we moderns know, with no evidence that consciousness goes anywhere after death, and where millions perish unjustly under the horrors authorized by Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot and Putin, for no higher purpose. Where the ultimate fate of the human species is not a kingdom of heaven without end, but extinction.
This God is not ibn Sīnā’s God, who is required for us to understand nature and the world; it is a God whose presence does not seem to make much if any difference to the way the world works. And such a God seems much more representative of the world we actually live in. The claims about God’s judgement, in turn, make sense in the light of Augustine’s and Gandhi’s view that truth is God: your actions are truly good or bad, even though they are not rewarded or punished for being such.
Ecclesiastes gives a warning to eudaimonists: do not expect that your virtue will pay off in external goods. Virtue is virtue and God will judge it, but he will not reward it. Thus Doull takes Ecclesiastes as the model of an ethics where what makes an action good is independent of our desires, in contrast to the Sophists’ view where they are identical – externalism over internalism. With that recognition in mind, the eudaimonist position it’s easiest to end up in is that of the Stoics and Epicureans, where external goods don’t matter; the payoff of virtue is in mental happiness and in the goodness of virtue itself.
This all makes Ecclesiastes sound gloomy and depressing. And to those who were expecting a God-soaked world of divine justice, it is indeed depressing by comparison. But Ecclesiastes looks different when we take it on its own terms. There, what I find inspiring in Ecclesiastes is that in the midst of all this suffering and injustice, we can still find joy and beauty in the everyday, in the cruel, crazy, beautiful world: “it is good and comely for one to eat and to drink, and to enjoy the good of all his labour that he taketh under the sun all the days of his life, which God giveth him: for it is his portion.” Here Ecclesiastes closely resembles the Aztec Cantares Mexicanos and their reminder that “only in passing are we here on earth. In peace and pleasure let us spend our lives: come, let us enjoy ourselves.”
So too I see Ecclesiastes as close to Leonard Cohen’s Zen Judaism, which finds beauty and joy amid the world’s darkness. Cohen knows the Dao is in the piss and shit. God is present in Cohen’s lyrics, but he is a mysterious presence, haunting the world in the background. This God wants it darker – not unlike Krishna, who is also a god for the real world.
I find all of this to be a comfort at those times, which surface in all of our lives, when we are reminded of the world’s injustice: when in the course of our own lives we see the righteous perish and the wicked thrive. We want to see virtue rewarded and vice punished with something more than internal goods – we have a theodicy instinct – but far too often, that’s just not the way the world actually works. Would it be better if it did work that way? Sure, but what matters is it doesn’t. This world is the one we actually we live in. If we are to have a good and happy life, we must have it in this world, not in a just one. Ecclesiastes, like the Cantares, reminds us of a universal lesson also taught in the Desiderata: with all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.
A thought-provoking post!
Thanks!
Regarding “beauty and joy amid the world’s darkness” and “God wants it darker”, I would say of these turns of phrase the same thing that I said about the Lovecraftian “coldness” of the universe in my comment on the earlier post “The world before and after us” (October 2020): these representations project onto the universe a particular subjective perspective and mood.
One of the insights I’ve grained from study and practice of Buddhist and Western psychology is that it is possible to separate my science-based model of the universe from my moods and emotions about how the universe appears to me, so that I can process the moods and emotions without projecting them onto my model. This is an instance of what some psychologists call cognitive defusion, although I might prefer the term cognitive differentiation or Suzanne Cook-Greuter’s term construct awareness. I’m no Biblical scholar, but my impression of the Bible is that this kind of insight is not its strength, especially in contrast to Buddhist psychology (but I admit that I can’t back this up with chapter and verse from the Bible, and I could be wrong).
Does Ecclesiastes teach that if “we want to see virtue rewarded and vice punished with something more than internal goods”, then we have to reward virtue and punish vice ourselves, as a society of sentient beings with explicit norms, and not expect a God to do it for us?
Interesting question. On my non-expert reading of it, I’m not sure that Ecclesiastes does teach that. It tells its readers to keep God’s commandments, but I don’t think it tells them to push others to do so.
As for projecting subjectivity onto the universe: well… I think that’s unavoidable in some sense. The only way we know the universe and its objects is through our subjectivity. What we do in meditation is itself its own kind subjective observation of our subjective perspectives and moods – but a disaggregating one, one that separates the subjective mood from the subjective observer. Point of saying that is that I don’t think that the kinds of analyses we call scientific have the last word in understanding the universe: we come to them from the needs and perspectives of our own subjectivity. A claim like “the universe is beautiful but not intrinsically good” might be false, but it’s not obviously or inherently false.
Regarding your first paragraph, something like that was my non-expert guess too. In that case, no wonder (at least parts of) Ecclesiastes can be seen as pessimistic: the text intuits, I guess, that there is no divine reward and punishment, but it doesn’t empower people to take responsibility, as a society, for enacting appropriate reward and punishment themselves, or stated more positively, for guiding moral progress.
I wouldn’t say that projecting subjective emotions and moods onto the universe is “unavoidable”; if that were true, much of the Buddhist psychology and metaphysics that developed from Yogācāra onward would be meaningless. Such projection may be how I operate naturally and naively, but the lesson of Buddhist psychology is that I can learn to see through this process and restructure my cognition so that I process external and internal events differently. Part of the Buddhist epistemology of emptiness is a conception of the universe as empty of my concepts and feelings about it. When I am aware of this, I am aware that there are multiple ways to conceptualize reality, so I can continue refining my models of reality (which need not be related to modern science, but modern science has some of the best resources for model-refining and I wouldn’t want to ignore them) far beyond my natural and naive perceptions without being trapped in one unchanging model that’s fused with a particular emotional evaluation. And that’s a central part of Buddhist awakening/liberation as I understand it. Admittedly this could be considered advanced Buddhist psychology that even many Buddhists don’t understand well. Anyway, that’s the perspective from which my comment came.
On the first part, I think I stand with Ecclesiastes’s pessimism (to the extent that that’s what it is): you can build societies that are more just or less just, but there will always be those who escape that attempt. Nobody’s managed to make the results fully match the actions so far and I don’t see reason to expect it to start.
On the second, I agree that Buddhist psychology is about restructuring our conceptualizing differently – and I do think that this is possible. The question is how. I don’t think it is about seeing the universe in an objective way devoid of subjectivity (whether or not we think that’s possible). That would be a particularly strange approach for Yogacara – aka Cittamatra, mind-only! I agree that Buddhist practice requires some separating of external and internal to occur – but in the other direction, such that the external doesn’t impact the internal. Where we recognize that bad external events don’t have to affect our minds, in order to stop them from doing so.
Yes, when there is no divine or cosmic justice, then there are no guarantees; we will never have total control of nature and probably would be foolish to want it. (That may not be the best way of saying it, but that’s a way of assenting.)
“I agree that Buddhist practice requires some separating of external and internal to occur – but in the other direction, such that the external doesn’t impact the internal. Where we recognize that bad external events don’t have to affect our minds, in order to stop them from doing so.”
But I would say that cognizing “external” and “internal” as you do here is still trapped in what we would seem to agree are the natural and naive perceptions that the post-Yogācāra traditions teach us to see through. The restructuring isn’t about seeing the universe in an “objective” way but in a “multi-perspectival” way, where events both are and are not external or internal, and both are and are not good or bad, and more basically both are and are not events, and where we are aware of our cognitive choices in this multi-perspectivity. Something like that (although I may not have said it eloquently) restructures our cognition in a much more profound way than what I take to be the more superficial and quasi-Stoic technique of not letting bad external events affect our minds.
I’d say I’m a little undecided on the Yogācāra and post-Yogācāra perspectives. The Buddhism I generally have faith in is Theravāda and Śāntideva, which are of a more classical kind. I have more recently learned a lot from Headspace and modern mindfulness, though, and I do think those draw from post-Yogācāra traditions in a way that often isn’t sufficiently appreciated. I’m somewhat skeptical toward Yogācāra approaches but wanting to keep an open mind – but not so open that I’d call the earlier approach “superficial”!
I thought more about the following statement, to which I didn’t know how to respond at first:
“A claim like ‘the universe is beautiful but not intrinsically good’ might be false, but it’s not obviously or inherently false.”
If “the universe is beautiful” is a way of saying “the universe appears beautiful to me”, and if “the universe is not intrinsically good” is a way of saying that there is no cosmic justice or benevolence, all of that seems both construct-aware and reasonable.
What I originally aimed to criticize is language that projects subjective mood or emotion or intention or similar qualities into onto the universe in a matter-of-fact way, portraying the universe as warm or cold, dark or light, meaningful or meaningless, benevolent or indifferent (or cruel), etc. As Asa Henderson and I suggested in comments on the earlier post “The world before and after us”, the Lovecraftian portrayal of the cosmos as cold, dark, meaningless, indifferent (or cruel) is sort of an afterimage of the Christian portrayal of it as warm, light, meaningful, benevolent. Both strike me as melodramatic myths and not construct-aware.
On my first reading of the current post, the “world’s darkness” and “God wants it darker” language triggered my memory of this issue, but now I think that I was misinterpreting and reading too much of the Lovecraftian statements from previous posts into this one, when Amod was just saying in a flowery poetic way that there is no cosmic justice or benevolence.
At this point in my life I prefer a more analytical and less poetic approach to socio-behavioral problems. Abhidharma and not Ecclesiastes.
So there’s a lot in this comment and this issue that I haven’t fully thought through myself. This is actually a big point where my sympathy for Yogācāra does come through – in a way closely tied to my Hegelianism. That is: there is a common sharp dichotomy that I don’t want to make, in which the objective universe has absolutely nothing to do with our subjective qualities of perception (which include emotion), such that any mapping of those qualities onto aspects of the universe constitutes a “projection”. There is nothing we can say or know about objects that isn’t constituted in part by our subjectivity, and so that subjectivity does need to constitute some part of our understanding.
I’m thinking here about the modern Hegelianism of John McDowell, who (like me) is not willing to accept Hegel’s “the actual is rational” in its full original sense, but is willing to say “the actual is conceptualizable“, the latter being an inherent quality of it. That can be generalized: there is a certain X-ability to phenomena in the universe for many Xes that have to do with our subjective experience. As I understand him, Mark Johnston takes McDowell’s approach into aesthetics: we are constituted to be the sorts of beings who appreciate certain inherent features of the universe, and it’s meaningful to phrase those features as “the universe is beautiful” – in a way that is not merely a shorthand for speaking about the kind of beings we are, but also says something about the universe itself.
Yes, I think I agree with all that, although some of my intellectual reference points are different. I’ve never read McDowell, but I’ve read Johnson, I and don’t recall disagreeing with anything in his work. But, as I recall, nothing I’ve read by Johnson addresses how metacognitive development or epistemological development can be beneficial for us and can change the way we experience universe and self and their relation in a way that leads to better knowledge and more freedom, which I consider to be central to the Buddhist tradition. Nowadays when I have an experience that might lead me to say “the universe is beautiful”, it’s different from an experience that I would have labeled the same way when I was a child and as a younger adult; there is more knowledge and more metacognitive awareness in the experience (I hope—there could also be more delusion or misconception in certain respects). There is a different gestalt that would be made explicit if you did an open-ended interview with me about it when I was a child, as a younger adult, and now. It’s that cognitive difference that interests me and that I’m pointing toward.
I would also note that your post “The world before and after us” that I was reminded of by some of the language in this post was just a set-up for a subsequent post on “The need for subjectivity”, so I know you’ve definitely addressed some of these issues before.
Yeah, I think I agree with all you’re saying here. My biggest criticism of Hegel and Hegelians is that they often seem to have no real conception of self-transformation in any sense beyond conceptual understanding. Hegel says the way to make a good person is to bring him up in a state with good laws; McDowell seems to endorse Wittgenstein’s view that philosophy leaves everything as it is. Whatever we take from a Hegelian view, it’s crucial that we not repeat that mistake of leaving out self-transformation.
You might be interested to know that in the Jewish tradition (the original source of Ecclesiastes), we read the book aloud during Sukkot, one of the happiest times of the year. It stands in contrast to the holiday of Yom Kippur, which comes five days before Sukkot. On Yom Kippur the dominant image is of God as judge, writing us into the Book of Life for the next year…or not. As you point out, that is very far from the image of God in Ecclesiastes.
Make of that what you will. From the inside of the tradition, I read it as saying that we need both those points of view (AND Exodus, and Song of Songs) to approach anything like reality.
I didn’t know you read Ecclesiastes during Sukkot. I’m intrigued – especially with the implication in your post that Sukkot is more joyous than Yom Kippur. Almost suggesting that life without God’s intervention is happier than life with it.
And I mean… Do you think that Jewish tradition puts less emphasis on God’s supposed omnibenevolence than Christian tradition does? I mean when God does intervene in the Hebrew Bible, it’s often so troubling – like God punishing the Pharaoh for something that He made him do. He seems a lot like Krishna, who is decidedly not omnibenevolent, though you can’t get away from him.
Thanks for this. Your post makes me want to read the Bible — and that is an accomplishment!
There’s a lot of good stuff in the Bible if you look for it! The section that Ecclesiastes (and the Song of Songs) is in is called the “wisdom books”.
Ecclesiastes has always been my favorite book of the Bible. Books like Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs, and Job remind us the Hebraic tradition does not speak with a single voice, but is multiperspectival and multivocal. Last fall an in-law of mine who is an evangelical Christian declared there were only two genders, and quoted Genesis to back himself up: “Male and female He created them!” Case closed. You can imagine a mic drop at this point, if you like. It got me to thinking how peculiar it is to use a text to close down a discussion rather than to open it up as a starting point of inquiry. Last week a transendered Rabbi wrote an opinion piece in the NY Times in which he quoted the same Genesis text and explored how the Talmud understood it. One Talmudic rabbi thought that “male and female He created them” suggested Adam was an androgyne—that Adam was created both male and female. The hypertexual structure of the Talmud insures the multiperspectival nature of the tradition. So a text like Ecclesiastes is a kind of invitation to wonder. What were our ancestors thinking when they included it as a canonical text? How did they understand it from within the tradition? And how can we undertand it today—what does it suggest to us as modern people? And sorry, Nathan, but I prefer poetry to the abidharma. Alan Watts used to divide the world into the “pricklies” and the “fuzzies”—those who prefer math to poetry and vice versa. De Gustibis.
I love these thoughts, Seth. My outsider impression has always been that Jews, even conservative/traditionalist ones, encourage disagreement and debate a lot more than Christians do (“two Jews, three opinions”) – and I love that about the tradition. I think it’s a wonderful form of humility to acknowledge that no humans – including a human interpreting scripture – don’t have all the answers.
As you might imagine, for my own personal reasons I am particularly delighted by the interpretation that Adam was created both male and female! (Could “He created them” even be a non-binary singular “they”? I wonder if that works in the Hebrew.) Could you say more about that Talmudic rabbi? I think I’d like to look that up.
ESPECIALLY traditional Jewish scholars believe that the text can hold more than one meaning!
Even on the “plain meaning” level of the text (p’shat), there can be valid disagreements, and while sometimes you have to decide between them for purposes of practice, you study all of them. Then there are the other levels of interpretation: remez, drash, sod. The acronym you can make of the names of these four levels is Pardes, which by no accident sounds like “paradise.” https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/pardes
Here’s an excerpt from the sources on the adam story. (In Hebrew, “adam” means human being” before it becomes a name.) The full teaching material can be found at https://rac.org/sites/default/files/Gender%20in%20Jewish%20Traditoin%20.pdf
Gender in Jewish Tradition
Compiled by Rabbi Rachel Ackerman
GENESIS 1:26-27
And God said, “Let us make adam (human) in our image, after our likeness…And God
created the adam in [God’s] image, in the image of God (b’tzelem Elohim) [God] created
him, man and woman [God] created them.”
Question: The word “adam” here can be understood not as Adam, the person (who
really comes around in Genesis 2), but as a human being (or more literally “earthling”). If
we read the text this way, what complications do you imagine that the midrashic rabbis
had about the first adam, the first human being? Also, according to what was the first
adam created?
GENESIS RABBAH 8:1
AND GOD SAID: LET US MAKE ADAM, etc. (Genesis 1:26). …
Rabbi Yermiah ben Elazar said: When the Holy One, blessed be God, created adam,
[God] created him an androgynos, for it is said, male and female [God] created them
and called their name Adam (Gen.5:2).
Rabbi Samuel ben Nachman said: When Adonai created Adam, [God] created him
double-faced, then [God] split him and made him of two backs, one back on this side
and one back on the other side…
Rabbi Tanhuma in the name of Rabbi Benayah and Rabbi Berechya in the name of Rabbi
Elazar said: [God] created him as an amorphous mass (golem) extending from one end
of the world to the other…
Question: Here we see three different interpretations of Genesis 1:26-27. How did each
of the rabbis understand the first adam, human? What did the first adam look like? What
were its physical features and qualities?
Also relevant: https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-eight-genders-in-the-talmud/
Here’s the NY Times article referred to above https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/18/opinion/trans-teen-suicide-judaism.html?fbclid=IwAR2g0vTWwv5-gQvgSnQGzo6kr2x7YLykVvB6QzurAg14LnG2hbGMd5br1i0
Thanks, this is great! This is all very new territory for me. Am I reading correctly that this is an excerpt from the Talmud, in which Rabbah refers to the commentary on a particular book, and it collects the interpretations of famous rabbis? The first Yermiah ben Elazar quote seems to be the big thing I’m looking for, and I’m trying to figure out the context. Do we know much about ben Elazar beyond this text?
Genesis Rabbah (or Breishit Rabbah, as Hebrew speakers often call it) is not in the Talmud. It’s a separate book of midrash (searching interpretation) of the first book of the Torah. You are right that all the books with “Rabbah” in them are in the same genre.
The method is similar to the method of the Talmud, however; specifically, it is similar to the interspersed sections of the Talmudic discussion where the rabbis are not trying to deduce guides to practical action (midrash halachah) but are trying to find deeper meaning in the text, often through storytelling (midrash aggadah).
Yermiah ben Elazar– the name can be transliterated in various ways–was an aggadist of the third amoraic generation (second half of the third century). I am not enough of a scholar to tell you more about him myself.
Thanks! All new territory for me, and a fascinating one.
To be sure, I couldn’t live on abhidharma alone! But when I try to read Ecclesiastes, I yearn for something more systematic and am acutely aware of how far human knowledge has progressed since it was written. To be fair, much of abhidharma strikes me as old-fashioned too, but it’s so well-organized! Ultimately I’m more of a pragmatist/empiricist than a man of the Book, whether Dharmic or Abrahamic.